In a busy healthcare environment, such as a hospital, clinicians roam frequently among patients, floors and buildings. Each time a clinician reaches a new location, she may require access to patient information or other medical data maintained by the facility (or elsewhere). That data may be accessed via a local, typically shared workstation, or via a handheld wireless device, such as a “smart phone” or tablet capable of hosting applications and establishing telecommunications, Internet and/or local intranet connections.
In particular, medical institutions from hospitals to physician practice groups to testing centers maintain diverse electronic medical records (EMR) systems, which collectively form the healthcare information backbone. EMR systems allow clinicians access to medical information maintained in various back-end systems. The typical workflow when a physician interacts with a patient involves first logging onto the computer system, then launching and logging into one or more EMR applications, selecting the right patient record, verifying that the record matches the patient, reviewing results (often from different sources), checking up on medical references, entering orders or prescriptions (e.g., using computerized physician order entry (CPOE) applications and ePrescribing), and/or charting patient progress. All of these activities may involve the same patient but different applications, and in some cases multiple separate applications for a single patient-specific activity.
Moreover, healthcare records are protected by strict privacy laws (such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA), regulatory regimes, and institutional access policies. Accordingly, when a clinician moves from place to place, he may be required to log on to a new terminal or device, and because of data-access restrictions, the log-on procedure may involve cumbersome and/or multiple authentication modalities. Depending on system configuration, the clinician may be required to re-launch the applications that were running on the previously used device. Therefore, there is a need for systems that streamline or avoid authentication procedures and provision a workspace for clinicians on the move, and this, in turn, may depend on knowledge of a clinician's physical location within a facility. Knowledge of a particular individual's location may be obtained in various ways, including from the location of a device with which she interacts—assuming, of course that the device location is accurately known. In a large facility, even seemingly “fixed” devices such as workstations can be moved periodically, and mobile workstations obviously change location frequently.
For example, the location of a device may be specified by global-positioning system (GPS) coordinates, and if the node is equipped with a GPS chipset, its location can be updated as it is moved. Unfortunately, many workstations and other devices are not GPS-equipped, and indeed, GPS tracking is not always possible even for devices that are GPS-enabled; for example, GPS often does not work well within buildings.